By Tom Deignan Best-Selling Dublin-born author Emma Donoghue has a brilliant and timely new novel out. Set in an Irish maternity ward during the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918, The Pull of the Stars explores the challenges and heroism of nurses and other health care workers, while at the same time tenderly chronicling the loves and losses of their inner lives. Tom Deignan … [Read more...] about The Pull Of The Stars
Books
Bobby Kennedy Has Been Turned into an Impossibly Perfect Hero
By Brian Dooley
He deserves a better judgment As Bobby Kennedy lay dying on a hotel kitchen floor, we’re told his last words were of concern for those around him who had also been shot. “Is everybody okay?” Kennedy asked. These noble, altruistic last conscious thoughts chime with how many people see him – a champion of the poor, “a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, … [Read more...] about Bobby Kennedy Has Been Turned into an Impossibly Perfect Hero
Black and Green Today
By Brian Dooley
More than 20 years ago I wrote a book about the links between the U.S. civil rights movement and the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland. Black and Green (published in 1998) did okay, reviewers were kind, and some schools and universities in the U.S. and Europe forced their students to read it. What’s surprised me is that two decades on it’s enjoying a mini-revival. Its … [Read more...] about Black and Green Today
Frank & Al
A new book by Terry Golway on the developing Democratic party through the lens of F.D.R. and Al Smith Frank and Al: FDR, Al Smith, and the Unlikely Alliance and Epic Feud that Created the Modern Democratic Party by Terry Golway allows readers to see the massive change to the Democratic party that both Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Al Smith ushered in during the mid- … [Read more...] about Frank & Al
Bram Stoker’s Dracula
By Carstens Smith, Contributor
October 26, 2017
October 26, 2017
The setting, Transylvania. The writing style, High Victorian. The story’s appeal, universal. But the author of one of fiction's most famous and imitated works is Irish. Carstens Smith brings us the story of Bram Stoker, the creator of Dracula. Bram Stoker, whose name is less well known than that of his creation, Dracula, was born in Dublin on November 8, 1847. He was called … [Read more...] about Bram Stoker’s Dracula